Browsed byMonth: June 2017

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.14: Heads I Win, Tales You Lose. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, but be sure to seek legal advice before listening to this podcast.

In this week’s podcast, Judith Miller, a law professor at the University of Chicago who worked as a federal public defender, joins us to give a public defender’s perspective on our criminal justice system. We discuss some of the criminal and civil protections for police officers, including ways in which the exclusionary rule has been hollowed out.

We also discuss the ways that the defense is handicapped relative to the prosecution, in pre-trial evidence gathering, sentence reduction offers for testimony, permissible bending of the truth, and even penalties for misconduct.

We’ll return in two weeks with This is Fine 1.15, as we discuss the surprisingly relevant criminal foreign policy scandal that did not take down a sitting President, Iran-Contra.

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.13: Mo’ Prisons, Mo’ Problems. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, and play this podcast during your next traffic stop.

In this week’s podcast, we discuss mass incarceration and some of the injustice in our criminal justice system. We discuss Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Chris Hayes’ A Colony in a Nation.

We briefly touch on order: police shootings, underpolicing, and the difficulty of prosecuting police misconduct. We also look at the law: tax farming of citizens, prosecutorial discretion and misconduct, plea bargains, and the consequences of judicial elections. Finally we look at some possible criminal justice reforms.

We’ll return in two weeks with This is Fine 1.14, with special guest Judith Miller (but not that Judith Miller), and continue discussing our criminal justice system, this time from the perspective of a public defender.